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Real Officers, Fake Badges

Perhaps no tool in police work holds the legal or emotional significance of the badge, a few ounces of nickel alloy that is covered by an insignia and a shield number.

Badges are routinely handed down from father to child in police families. As rookies, officers are taught to guard them closely and generally to keep them on hand, on duty or off. But in New York, a city that has become almost synonymous with high security, where office employees wear picture IDs and surveillance cameras are on the rise, some officers do not wear their badges on patrol.

Instead, they wear fakes.

Called “dupes,” these false badges are often just a trifle smaller than real ones but otherwise completely authentic. Officers use them because losing a real badge can mean paperwork and a heavy penalty, as much as 10 days’ pay.

Though fake badges violate department policy, they are a quirk deeply embedded in the culture and history of the New York Police Department. Estimates of how many of the city’s 35,000 officers use fake badges vary from several thousand to several hundred — roughly 25 officers are disciplined each year for using them — but the practice has become more sensitive since 9/11 and heightened concern about police impersonation. [NYT]

Government & Politics

With the impasse over how to cut more than $3 billion from the state budget stretching into its fourth week, Gov. David A. Paterson said on Monday that he would withhold payments that are due to local governments over the next several months, a move that threatened to squeeze social service providers, schools and municipal governments. [NYT]

Jurors deliberating on Monday for a second day in the federal corruption trial of Joseph L. Bruno, the former State Senate majority leader, asked to be read the testimony that appeared to be helpful to Mr. Bruno. [NYT]

Crime & Public Safety

Nearly one in five undercover officers in the New York Police Department said they had been in confrontations in which they were mistaken for suspects by fellow officers — and found themselves suddenly staring down the barrel of a loaded weapon. [NYT]

A federal judge has appointed a former prosecutor to investigate corruption and mob influence in the powerful union that represents most tower crane and heavy equipment operators in New York City, a move prompted by numerous convictions of union officials and organized crime figures. [NYT]

The city is making a new push to curb the number of illegally converted apartments after a series of deadly fires, warning residents in the Bronx and Queens that illegally subdivided homes can become deathtraps in a fire. [Daily News]

Citing high rates of graffiti, the City Council voted on Monday to gradually ban the use of roll-down metal security gates, a move that would eliminate what has been an enduring if forbidding feature of the urban streetscape. [NYT]

Transportation

All it took was a standard stick shift to foil a carjacking on the Upper East Side on Monday. [New York Post]

Schools

Propelled by budget cuts and enrollment increases, class sizes in the New York City public school system rose this year, with high school students and kindergartners in particular feeling the squeeze. [NYT]

People & Neighborhoods

In his NYC column, Clyde Haberman explains how on Thanksgiving morning a doorman to an exclusive hotel with sweeping views of the Macy’s parade was labeled a “counterterrorism agent” and a public street was effectively privatized. [NYT]

A Bensonhurst man won a national award for his song about being laid off. “Seven years in college, to achieve my dream,” the song begins. “Never thought I’d end up with food stamps to redeem.” [Daily News]

I would like to know whether an “officer” with a fake badge must be obeyed as if s/he were a real officer with a real badge? Don’t we citizens have a right to ask to see a person’s badge before obeying orders from that person? And, if that badge is a fake, why would anyone be required to obey the person with the fraudulent police badge? More importantly, how do citizens distinguish between real and fake badges? Any crook could display a fake badge.

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